Diving into the Realm of Plugins

After succeeding in getting a theme into the WordPress Theme Directory, I’m trying my hand at doing the same with plugins.

Actually the move to write and submit a plugin comes quicker than I would have liked, all thanks to my plans for Giornalismo. In my initial creation of the theme I realized that themes aren’t able to create custom post types, which makes since all of those custom post types posts would go away if the user switches themes.

So to sort of fix that situation I created a breaking news banner plugin to be able to include that feature for Giornalismo. The actual writing of the plugin was quite simple. In fact, it took me just a couple of days to finish, test and tweak it before I submitted it.

It’s a fairly basic plugin with a custom post type that has fields for the link, the length of time shown and whether or not the link opens in a new plugin. It’s also able to work on other themes as well.

As for Giornalismo, I added a spot for users to add a video link, preferably to YouTube, that will show a video in place of a featured image in the single post and top story sections. Now the plan going forward will be to spruce up the design to the latest web design standards, beginning with the main and top menus.